Google Is to Blame for Tuesday's Widespread Internet Outage

Lucas NolanNovember 17, 2021

A massive internet outage Tuesday that took down multiple sites, including Breitbart News, appears to be the result of a global issue with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

ZDNet reports that at around 12:53 p.m. EST multiple sites went down across the internet. Google reported at the time that it was facing a global issue with its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) networking at the time. Websites including Spotify, Facebook, and Breitbart News were affected by the outage.

Google train (Alex Wong /Getty)

At its peak, DownDetector showed how widespread the issue was noting that online services from Pokémon Go to the Home Depot website were being affected.

Experts observed that the specific problem appeared to be with the GCP load balancers. These work alongside Google’s Cloud Delivery Network (CDN) and provide high availability web servers for sites across the internet.

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, speaks at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco on 28 June 2012 ( KIMIHIRO HOSHINO/AFP/GettyImages )

The system is designed to prevent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that attempt to send traffic to websites overloading them. However, due to the global issue Google was unable to keep the websites live.

By 1:59 p.m. Google reported: “The issue with Cloud Run has been resolved for all affected users.” The company added: “We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.” However, many users are still reporting outages across various web services.

Google has since stated that it will be providing more information on the issue, writing: “We will publish an analysis of this incident, once we have completed our internal investigation.”